William Hepworth Dixon, White Conquest: Volume 1

Yet the tribes and families which fell under the Franciscan Commonwealth are more advanced and better off than any other Red tribes and families. An Indian commissioner, who has no clerical bearings to betray his judgment, writes:--“ The mission Indians, having been for the past century under the Catholic missions established on the Californian coast, are tolerably well advanced in agriculture, and compare favourably with the most highly civilised tribes of the East.” He adds, in detail, that these civilised Indians “support themselves by working for White settlers, or by hunting, fishing, begging, and stealing, except a few, who go to the military post for assistance in the way of food.”

These waifs in the agencies have some support; the other waifs and strays have none. Since they lost the friars, these converts have been perishing in their tens, their fifties, nay their hundreds; yet the State does nothing for them, and the sturdy settler, in his hurry to be safe, is brushing them from his path as roughly as he stamps out wolves and bears.

What wonder, then, that old Marcello should regard